GRUB Help and Reinstalling Ubuntu

Recently, I installed Ubuntu 10 Netbook edition (on my netbook, yes, obvious). My battery died literally, while I was using Ubuntu.

Now, when I restart the computer, it seems that GRUB has duplicated all of the entries in the MBR that pertain to the partition that houses my Ubuntu install. For example:

Ubuntu ...
Ubuntu ... (Recovery Mode)
Ubuntu ...
Ubuntu ... (Recovery Mode)
Memtest ...
Memtest ...
Windows (Vista loader)
Windows (Windows 7 starter loader) 

When I try to access either of the two Ubuntu instances in the boot loader it presents me with an error akin to this:

...numbers... Kernel panic ... VFS unable to mount...

What I would like to do is:

Wipe out grub, and Ubuntu, and then reinstall Ubuntu (I really only use it for emacs and ess for R so there's nothing in the home directory that I need to backup)

How would I go about "resetting" my system? Or fixing the issue that I have.

Thanks in advance!

BEB

Solution 1:

It seems like there is some issue with loading the initrd: possibly the GRUB configuration file is corrupt. If you want to try fixing your existing install, I would try the following:

1. Boot from live CD or USB stick (the Ubuntu Wiki has instructions on how to prepare a bootable installation USB stick)

2. Re-install GRUB; some instructions are available in this post.

However, if you don't have any valuable data on the disk, it may just be simpler to reinstall: just use the Ubuntu Live CD or a bootable USB key, wipe out your existing Linux partitions (using the "Manual partitioning scheme" in the installation; you can also let the installer "Use whole disk for Ubuntu" if you don't have Windows or other OSes on the disk), and then proceeed installing as usual.